OBAMA SPEAKS AT WEST POINT AT 10 -- WHAT RAND WAS DOING YESTERDAY -- FIRST INCUMBENT TO LOSE IN '14: Rep. Ralph Hall, age 91 -- NEW COTTON AD FEATURES WIFE -- THE 'UNPLUGGED' WEDDING -- RUDY IS 70

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FIRST LOOK -- SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER reacts to President Obama’s decision to delay releasing results of a Homeland Security review of administration deportation policies until late summer: “Once again the President has shown a willingness to work with Republicans to get immigration reform done. The House Republicans are now out of excuses not to pass immigration reform and the ball is in their court. Supporters of reform have bent over backwards to give the House space to act, and now it’s time for them to do so.” http://goo.gl/UVhWV2

TOP TALKER -- “Can Andrew Sullivan Re-Conquer Washington? After 18 miserable months in New York, the pioneering blogger is back in DC with plans to transform journalism all over again,” by Sophie Gilbert in the June issue of Washingtonian: “Sullivan’s domestic routine in DC—roll out of bed, read the news, spend a few hours firing off blog posts, hit the gym by 6, the diner by 8, play … Angry Birds, and wind down with some ‘South Park’—is nothing if not comfortable. It’s definitely at odds with the brash fervor of his rise in the ’90s, back when he posed for a Gap ad shot by Annie Leibovitz as a hauntingly beautiful young man in black-and-white with a quizzical, almost vulnerable expression. Back then, his idiosyncrasies were fascinating to predictable Washington—here was a British, Oxford-educated, Catholic, gay conservative who resisted categorization. …

“In 1993, two years into his editorship at the New Republic, Sullivan applied for a green card, only to learn during a physical that he was HIV-positive. … Sullivan still lives in the Adams Morgan loft he bought while at the New Republic … Sullivan has done more than he ever could have hoped. … [T]hanks to … antiretroviral drugs, he may live another 20 or 30 years … Sullivan sought input from … Matt Drudge. His advice—that blogging is more akin to broadcast journalism than it is to print—helped shape the Dish’s unrelenting production cycle when news breaks. … Sullivan’s term for holing up to follow a developing story is ‘going cable.’ …

“What the Dish hasn’t done is drive the conversation … the way it used to. Since the site went independent in early 2013, only five of its most-viewed posts have attracted more than 100,000 page views. About 781,000 people visit the site every month … fewer readers than Sullivan was attracting at the Atlantic site 3½ years ago. … In the first four months of 2014, the Dish collected $727,000, a solid start toward its target of $1 million by year’s end. … [H]e acknowledges that blogging has a shelf life and that, given his health, he has no idea how much longer he can keep it up. He’s working on a book about religion.” http://goo.gl/ilvkn4

--“What Made Me: Andrea Mitchell,” as told to Rebecca Nelson in the June issue of Washingtonian: “When I was 12, I was the elementary-school reporter for the Standard Star in New Rochelle, New York. Once a week, I went downtown to file my column. I loved the sound of the typewriters and the look and feel of the newsroom. … After I’d been admitted to a training program at Westinghouse Broadcasting, they said, ‘We can’t have a woman in the newsroom.’ So I asked for a job as a ‘copy boy’ on the night shift, the lowest opening you could get, and they made an exception.” http://goo.gl/zxZbXw

HOT ON THE LEFT -- “As primary nears, Cantor mailer attacks 'amnesty,’” by AP’s Erica Werner: “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is boasting in a new campaign mailer of shutting down a plan to give ‘amnesty’ to ‘illegal aliens,’ a strongly worded statement from a Republican leader who's spoken favorably about acting on immigration. The flier sent by his re-election campaign comes as Cantor is under pressure ahead of his June 10 GOP primary.” http://goo.gl/rgquKW

READ OF THE DAY – NYT A1, “Once Allies, Ex-Obama Aides Face Off in British Campaign,” by Jason Horowitz in London: “[One day earlier this month David] Axelrod held forth on the similarities between Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and that of the Labour candidate for prime minister, Ed Miliband, who is running on a platform of narrowing economic inequality … A week earlier, Jim Messina … met at Downing Street with his client, Prime Minister David Cameron of the Conservative Party, who argues that years of austerity have corrected the profligate years of Labour rule and that tough immigration laws are protecting British values and jobs. …

“[T]he Battle of Britain crystallizes a concern among some Democrats over whether those most central to Mr. Obama’s rise should be expected in their private business to stand for his public policies and values. … The anxiety centers on Mr. Messina, 44, who … looms in the party’s future as the head of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama turned pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton ‘super PAC.’ That role has only intensified the sense among some Obama campaign and administration veterans that Mr. Messina’s work for the Tories has crossed an ideological threshold that his consulting for casinos and corporations only approached; some of his former associates have spurned his offers to join in the campaign effort in London.” http://goo.gl/yLuJvg

WORTH THE CLICK – “#YesAllWomen Visualization Shows How the Hashtag Spread Worldwide,” by VanityFair.com’s Kia Makarechi: “The misogyny on display [by the Santa Barbara shooter] was extreme, but thousands of women … found it all too familiar. And so they shared their stories on Twitter, using the hashtag #YesAllWomen—a clever twist on the #notallmen lines heard from men bent on arguing that not every man is misogynistic … The visualization … reveals how the hashtag spread from … writer Annie Cardi across much of the world.” http://goo.gl/fnF0oz ... Livestream of Tweets with the hashtaghttp://goo.gl/txcUwH

DEEP DIVE – “How The Congressional Black Caucus Went To War With Itself Over Wall Street,” by HuffPost’s Zach Carter and Ryan Grim: “[T]he tawdriness of its pro-Wall Street votes has become so blatant that several members have started to push back, led by Maxine Waters, the veteran Los Angeles legislator who serves as the top Democrat on the financial services panel. To many in the CBC, it feels like a battle for the storied caucus's soul -- and the result could dictate the direction of economic policy for the Democratic Party at large. …

“When a policy looks and feels bipartisan, it becomes tougher for an agency commissioner to take on the supposed consensus. A mere letter supporting or opposing a regulatory policy can have a formidable effect if the right names are on it. When it comes to bank reform, the ideal mix of backers, say lobbyists, is an even split of Democrats and Republicans, with a healthy contingent of CBC members to blunt the ideological edge. Or, if it's obvious that an issue has full GOP support -- any bank-reform repeal, for instance -- a letter from Democrats alone will suffice.” http://goo.gl/9FsVKK

EMAIL DU JOUR -- From an Arlington couple’s “Wedding Day Q&A” (which included this dress-code note: “Pocket squares will get a high five from the groom”): “We are having an ‘unplugged’ wedding ceremony. During the ceremony, the bride and groom request the joyful sight of your smile instead of your smartphone, tablet, or camera. We kindly ask that all cell phones, cameras, and electronic devices be turned off. We'll be happy to share our photographer's wedding ceremony pictures with you.”

FIRST-LOOK VIDEO: Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who looked favored to unseat Sen. Mark Pryor but has been hit with a series of tough polls, today begins airing the first ad to feature his wife of 10 weeks, Anna Peckham. The ad, “Deep Roots,” shows the newlyweds on the farm Cotton grew up on, in Dardanelle, in Yell County. The ad was made by OnMessage Inc., and will run in the Fort Smith market on broadcast and cable. Anna doesn’t speak because she is deputy general counsel for the National Reconnaissance Office, and covered by the Hatch Act.

With polls showing a tight race, Cotton – who represents about a quarter of the state -- has made a new push to define himself. “Deep Roots” is the latest in a series of bio ads featuring Cotton with his mother, father and drill sergeant – all designed to combat Democrats’ portrayal of him as a young man (he’s 37; Pryor, in his 12th year as senator, is 51) in too much of a hurry. The message: Cotton is a product of rural Arkansas, and the values he learned there took him to Harvard (undergrad and law) and then to the Army after 9/11. YouTubehttp://goo.gl/WgkMUt

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SEN. RAND PAUL (R-Ky.), with the Senate on break, yesterday performed cataract surgeries on four patients at an eye-surgery clinic in Paducah, Ky. None has insurance. Paul does this sort of thing every few months. The ext round will be in Guatemala in August, with a group of doctors who together will perform upwards of 200 surgeries in three days. The senator spoke with us about the surgeries, in a phone call from his car, near Dawson Springs, Ky.:

“Nobody is arguing about anything today. We just decided what was wrong and we all came to the same conclusion pretty quickly and we worked together. It's kind of unfortunate [that in] politics we don't get a little more of that. … We had three women and one man. They're in their 50s to 60s. Most of them have been waiting for some time. They knew they had cataracts but didn't have any insurance, and I think two of them might have been referred by a soup kitchen. … You have immediate results. … You figure out the problem, you do something, you immediately see something that works. …

“We're sort of out in the middle of rural Kentucky right now. Most of them don't bring in politics. Some of them do. They all know that I'm in office. And some of them are fascinated by the fact that I'm a physician and someone who they see on television and public office. … I guess my frustration in politics [is] even when we agree on things, … we can't anything done in Washington, and that is disappointing to me. Even when we know the answers to stuff—we all know that Social Security and Medicare are financially insolvent. We know how to fix it. But nobody is brave enough just to sit down together and fix it. … I don't know what the future holds, but I'm going to continue practicing medicine.”

HAPPENING TODAY, via AP: “OBAMA - The president is expected to outline a new foreign policy approach at West Point at 10 a.m. … EGYPT - Voting will continue Wednesday, with polls closing at 2 p.m. Final results are expected by early June.”

--BREAKING: “WASHINGTON (AP) - John Kerry [to Savannah Guthrie on ‘Today’]: US to start $5 billion fund to help other countries fight terrorism.”

--SOUNDBITE OF THE DAY – President Obama in the Rose Garden yesterday afternoon: “When I took office, we had nearly 180,000 troops in harm’s way. By the end of this year, we will have less than 10,000.” http://goo.gl/gVDU2Y

--“Obama sets out US exit from Afghanistan by end of 2016,” by AFP’s Tangi Quemener: “Obama [said] the 32,000 … US deployment in Afghanistan would be scaled back to … 9,800 by the start of 2015. Those forces would be halved by the end of 2015 before … being scaled back to a normal embassy presence with a security assistance component by the end of 2016.”

--HOW IT’S PLAYING: NYT 4-col. lead, “U.S. Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of ’16: Focus to Shift to Terror Threats Elsewhere” … WSJ 2-col. lead, “Obama Details Plan for Forces in Afghanistan: Promise of Robust Presence Through 2016 Comes Ahead of Foreign Policy Address” … USA Today lead, “AFGHANISTAN WAR -- Obama: U.S. all out by end of 2016 -- Temporary force of 9,800 troops to help in transition” … WashPost 1.5 col. lead, “9,800 U.S. troops to remain after war: OBAMA REVEALS PLAN FOR AFGHANISTAN – Goal is largely what military requested.”

PARTIAL KNEE REPLACEMENT for President George W. Bush – Freddy Ford emails Jonathan Topaz: “He underwent a successful partial knee replacement on Saturday in Chicago … It was an outpatient procedure and he was able to walk up and down a flight of stairs just a couple hours after the surgery. He came back to Dallas [Mon. and] is recovering quickly at home.”

--“Voters send oldest congressman home,” by Todd J. Gillman in Washington: “Voters sent 91-year-old Ralph Hall to an early retirement, … ending the career of the oldest man ever to serve in the U.S. House. John Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney who was only 15 when Hall won the seat in 1980, ousted him in the Republican runoff with a call for ‘fresh energy’ … At 48, he would have to keep the job until 2057 to match Hall’s remarkable … longevity. … In painting Hall as a career politician, Ratcliffe vowed to leave after just eight years.” http://goo.gl/ftUH1m

FIRST PERSON – “Defiant Grimm lashes out at media,” by Alex Isenstadt in New York: “A defiant Rep. Michael Grimm, in his most extensive interview since federal prosecutors accused him of rampant fraud, accused the media on Tuesday of trying to destroy him and vowed to campaign hard for reelection — even as the New York Republican acknowledged his fundraising has dried up to the point he can’t air TV ads. … [T]he former Marine and FBI agent suggested that GOP leaders … were acting ‘politically’ by refusing to back his reelection to a competitive Staten Island congressional district. Grimm, now literally running his own campaign after his lone full-time political aide departed last week, promised to prove his skeptics wrong.

“[In the interview] at Hinsch’s Diner in Brooklyn[,] Grimm … conceded he erred earlier this year when he physically threatened a reporter who asked about his legal troubles. … ‘If I pass a burning building, and I stop and I run in and I save a baby, you know what the headline will be? “Grimm starts the fire.” That’s just the reality.’ … Asked if he is innocent of the criminal charges, Grimm paused for four seconds, then chuckled softly. ‘You know, uh. It depends on what you’re asking me of,’ he said. … The [NRCC] … recently removed Grimm from a fundraising event aimed at supporting the GOP’s most imperiled incumbents. …

“The federal indictment accuses Grimm of defrauding the government by hiding some $1 million in sales and wages and employing illegal immigrants at a Manhattan fast-food restaurant he operated from 2007 to 2010. Among the charges are mail and wire fraud, hiring illegal immigrants and perjury. … The indictment has transformed Grimm from solid favorite to clear underdog in his reelection race against [former Democratic New York City Councilman Domenic] Recchia.” http://goo.gl/2rrv6d

TV TONIGHT – Brian Williams talks to Edward Snowden on “Nightly News” and in a 10 p.m. special: In his first interview with a U.S. television network, “Snowden fought back against critics who dismissed him as a low-level hacker, saying he was ‘trained as a spy’ and offered technical expertise to high levels of government.”

--SNOWDEN: “[I]t's no secret that the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people. I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas -- pretending to work in a job that I'm not, and even being assigned a name that was not mine. … I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency undercover overseas, I've worked for the National Security Agency undercover overseas … So when they say I'm a low level systems administrator, … it's somewhat misleading.” Video http://nbcnews.to/SMTopl ... Andrea Mitchell http://nbcnews.to/1hb9hBa

--NBC advisory: “Excerpts of the interview may be used subject to the following restrictions: a. Mandatory credit to NBC News on first reference. b. The onscreen ‘NBC News Exclusive’ credit must be clearly visible and unobstructed at all times in any image, video clip, or other form of media. c. Embedded web video must stream from the NBCNews.com media player with the unobstructed credit as described above.”

NETWORK NEWS … ABC’s Diane Sawyer: “The end in sight for America’s longest war. What the president revealed today about American troops coming home.” …CBS’ Norah O’Donnell: “Ending the war … the president sets a timetable for bringing home the troops.” … NBC’s Brian Williams: “Our NBC news exclusive: the first look at our conversation with Edward Snowden in Moscow, the American fugitive, the most wanted man in the world talks about the job he actually did for so many years.”

… CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “Breaking news: Donald Sterling's wife taking offers for the LA Clippers, hoping to reach a deal this week. Sources are now revealing new details to CNN about efforts to head up a forced sale by the NBA.” … Fox’s Bret Baier: “President Obama says he's ready to finish the job America started in Afghanistan, but his critics say it's a triumph of politics over strategy.” … PBS’ Gwen Ifill: “President Obama unveiled his new road map for drawing down American troops in Afghanistan, pulling all but 9,800 of them out by the end of this year and the rest out by 2016.”

THE JUICE – “Anchor with attitude: Jorge Ramos fights for immigration reform,” by Dylan Byers: “Jorge Ramos, the most popular Hispanic news anchor in America, arrived in Washington recently on an unusual journalistic mission: He wanted to challenge Speaker John Boehner about why he’s ‘blocking’ immigration reform. … ‘Republicans don’t get it. They’re going to lose the 2016 election if they don’t move on immigration reform, and they’re going to lose again in 2020,’ Ramos said in an interview. ‘They have a very short memory. They forgot in 2012. They’ll remember after 2016.’ …

“More than any other media figure, Ramos, 56, is the conduit between Washington politics and Hispanic America, population 55 million and growing. His Univision newscast is the most-watched Spanish-language news program in the United States, with an average viewership of 2.1 million. Last year, he expanded his audience with an English-language broadcast on Fusion, the Univision-ABC News joint venture targeted toward Hispanics and millennials. All this exposure has made him the second-most-popular Hispanic in the United States, trailing only Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, according to a recent Pew Research report surveying Latinos. …

“[T]he candidates will have to come to him if they want to win in 2016, he says, and he’s more than ready to hold them to account. ‘Immigration reform is a prerequisite for the Hispanic community… Without that, nothing is going to happen,’ he said. ‘If you want to go to the White House, you have to knock on the door of Univision and Fusion before. Because otherwise, you won’t get there.’” http://goo.gl/aotsnk

CHECK OUT MR. BUSINESSMAN – “[M]edia execs top CEO pay lists,” by AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima in L.A.: “[M]edia company CEOs are among the highest paid executives in the nation, occupying six of the top 10 earning spots according to an Associated Press/Equilar study. … Media companies' shares have rebounded strongly since the 2008 recession, mainly because advertising spending grows in tandem with a growing economy. That means higher-priced ads and higher-priced execs. … CBS Corp. shares grew a whopping 699 percent in [in the five years through December 2013]; Discovery Communications Inc. went up 539 percent; Viacom Inc. rose 377 percent; The Walt Disney Co. rose 250 percent; Time Warner Inc. climbed 259 percent and Comcast Corp. grew 223 percent. …

“Making it big in media means generating hits. … Take Disney's animated blockbuster ‘Frozen,’ which grossed $1.2 billion at box offices worldwide. While Disney CEO Bob Iger didn't make the movie, he did orchestrate Disney's $7.4 billion acquisition of Pixar in 2006, which brought in talented executives to help reform Disney's faltering animation studio. … CEO Brian Roberts, ranked No. 10, controls 33.3 percent of the voting power at Comcast. … Lists in previous decades might have had more financial and banking executives. Since the Great Recession punished those companies with government bailouts, bank collapses, accounting revisions and writedowns, they have dropped in the pay rankings.” http://goo.gl/fT1ofz

ENGAGED: David Powers proposed to Clare Murchison at sunrise on Sunday in Wrightsville Beach, N.C. David is a senior counsel at the RNC, and Clare is a teacher at Sidwell Friends School. (h/t James Hohmann) Pichttp://goo.gl/OCFuSq

Send to a friendOBAMA SPEAKS AT WEST POINT AT 10 -- WHAT RAND WAS DOING YESTERDAY -- FIRST INCUMBENT TO LOSE IN '14: Rep. Ralph Hall, age 91 -- NEW COTTON AD FEATURES WIFE -- THE 'UNPLUGGED' WEDDING -- RUDY IS 70